that is biographical. The function of existential psychoanalysis to
uncover the life-defining choice of an individual explains why this
procedure came at the end ofBN. As we noted earlier in our study,
the movement of the argument in BNis from the general to the
particular, from the abstract to the concrete. This movement facilitates
Sartre’s turn toward his promised ethics of authenticity^13 and lays the
structure of existential psychoanalyses (biographies) that exhibit his
abstract principles in individual lives.
The Rome lecture: “Morality and Society”
The focus of the notes for the Rome lecture is on the construction of a
“socialist” ethic.^14 This fits quite well with the many technical terms
from theCritiquethat punctuate these texts. It also builds on the notion
of group praxis as historically efficacious in contrast with that of the
solitary individual (analyzed inNE) who, Sartre now concedes, is socially
impotent.^15 Finally, it resonates with what Sartre told Beauvoir toward
the end of his life were his life-long guiding values: socialism and
freedom.^16
So how does such a “socialist ethics” unfold, addressed as it was to the
intellectuals of the Italian Communist Party and their foreign Marxist
guests? According to the typescript of these notes,^17 such an ethics must
meet at least four conditions. It must address theethical paradoxfacing
any ethics that claims to be both moral and concrete. This is the old
(^13) BN 70 ,n. 9. Later in the book he calls it an “ethics of deliverance and salvation”
(BN 412 ,n. 12 ).
(^14) This, at least, is the plausible interpretation of these notes by Elizabeth Bowman and Robert
Stone, who have worked these manuscripts as long and assiduously as anyone in North
America and, to the best of my knowledge, are the first to have published in English on both
15 the Rome and the Cornell lectures.
SeeORR 171. It was the “bourgeois individualism” ofNEthat Sartre offered as one of the
16 reasons for his abandoning it (seeCe ́r).
Which, we saw, was his title for the first “resistance” group that he gathered after his return
17 from the stalag in March^1941.
The source of these Rome lecture notes is the document available in the Bibliothe`que
Nationale (rue de Richelieu) in Paris and the typescript of the document presented by
Beauvoir to John Gerassi and now located in the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale. For a
reconstruction of the three documents referred to as Sartre’s “Dialectical Ethic,” see DE
195 – 215.
The Rome lecture: “Morality and Society” 359